Current work on lyric often sets Romantic interiority against postmodernist models of how language shapes the subject from without. Lyric is understood either through its traditional association with the expressive self, or through the ability of its formal features to highlight its status as literary language and suggest the alterity of all language. These discussions tend to elide or misrepresent distinctively modernist engagements with the relation of subjectivity to poetry. This panel asks: how might current discussion of lyric be enriched by engaging modernism more fully? and equally, how does recent poetry draw on and revise elements of modernism in exploring how selves inhabit language? Papers on aspects of modernist, mid-century, and contemporary poetry and poetics, and/or theory of lyric, are welcome, and might address topics including impersonality; confession; sincerity and authenticity; objectivity; emotion; analogies with visual arts, music, etc.; personae, masks, myth; address (including address to readers); psychoanalytic models of language; speech acts and performativity; etc.

Please send abstracts of no more than 300 words and a brief biographical statement (2-3 sentences) to Reena Sastri (rs531@york.ac.uk) by 3 May, 2009.